Tuesday, April 24, 2012

"Strict Regulation": A Cause for Alarm

Vivisectors always (really, always) claim that the use of animals is highly regulated, and so, the way the animals are used should not be a concern to the public. The public can rest assured that all is well.

When concerns are raised they claim that any worry about the animals or suspicion about what goes on in the labs is unwarranted because of the regulations. Very frequently they say that those raising the concerns just don’t know about the regulations or understand just how well the government controls the industry.

This appeal to authority is a rhetorical device intended to deceive the public.

But even it the vivisectors have convinced themselves it really is true, their claim ought to still raise an eyebrow.

They say, “Trust the government.”

The U.S. government’s track record of self-regulation and the widespread current problems it is having regulating its own staff should make it clear that vivisectors’ appeal to government regulations ought not be given much weight; the problems the U.S. government is having regulating itself makes the vivisectors’ appeal a cause for alarm.

U.S. Secret Service agents sent to Columbia to protect the President during his visit there hired prostitutes for what seems to have been some sort of secret agent orgy.

The General Services Administration (GSA), the federal agency charged with spending the taxpayer’s money as economically as possible on products and services the government needs to conduct the peoples’ business, held a gala $700,000 party for themselves, with our money.

Soldiers in Afghanistan, after burning some Korans and earning America even greater hatred in the Arabic world, even after similar previous problems in Iraq, took pictures of themselves smiling with posed Afghani corpses and Afghani body parts.

Neither the U.S. Army, the GSA, nor the Secret Service is able to regulate their own employees. It’s no wonder the government can’t regulate other organizations’ employees’ activities.

Large universities aren’t able to regulate their employees either. Think of the recent cases: Jerry Sandusky, John Chadima, Joe Paterno, for instance. Senior athletic staff members were sexual predators of underage students and children; other staff members and university administrators apparently knew about it and stayed silent.

Large universities, like the Catholic church, have a vested interest in keeping their dirt under the rug. Sex scandals are just part of it. Universities using animals have a long history of secrecy. They work diligently and at significant cost to the taxpayers to keep the details of what they do out of the public eye. The University of Madison, Wisconsin’s willful destruction of over 15 years of videos – 628 of them – documenting its primate experimentation is but one example

So, animals in university labs are used by institutions that go to great lengths to keep the details of the dark things they do hidden, and in the case of animals, when the dirt starts to show, they urge the public to look away, to stay calm, because, don’t you know, the use of animals in the labs is regulated by the U.S. government.